Homemade Pizza Sauce With Extra Veggies Recipe

To be fair, it’s not much of a recipe, rather just an idea to share.

My boy is on a restricted diet, which is beyond being a picky eater. He has sensory issues with food, with lots of food groups. Therefore he’s almost exclusively on a diet consisting of pizza, pasta with tomato sauce, cheese and cereal. On good days he eats the ham hidden between the cheese slices in his sandwich and drinks some smoothies. That’s not much to work with when you’re trying to feed him with healthy food. So I try everything to sneak some extra goodness into his food whenever I can.

I was making pizzas the other day, as I was testing a healthy new product, so I thought if I can make a tomato sauce with extra added vegetables for his pasta, I can do the same for his pizza. Because when we’re talking about him literally living on pizza, we’re only talking about one kind of pizza only: Margherita. Tomato sauce and lots of cheese.

Anyway, getting back to the pizza sauce, the only tricky thing is really, that you don’t want to overuse the extra vegetables. The golden rule is: the pizza sauce should look like and taste like a pizza sauce. In other words: keep it red – ish and it shouldn’t taste as broccoli. Other than that: be creative, you can use up any piece of veg left in the fridge!

Here’s what I used:

1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped

1 large garlic clove, crushed

700ml passata

1 small/medium bell pepper, chopped

1/2 of a large courgette, halved and sliced

1 tsp of dried oregano

1 tsp of dried basil

1 tbsp of olive oil

Few leaves of fresh basil

Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Fry the onions for 5 minutes on the oil in a medium pan. Use low heat all the way through. Add all the veggies you’re wanting to use along with the spices. Cover the pan and let them soften for 15 minutes. Then, pour the passata over it and cook it under a lid for another 15 minutes. When it’s ready, let it cool down a bit. Use a blender to get a smooth texture.

It keeps for 5-6 days in the fridge and of course you can freeze it too. Make a few batches since you’re cooking it anyway, in order to keep some weekday dinners less complicated and stressful, but still healthy and hearty.

You can also build our own pizza oven that will make it truly unique!